For years, the pension industry has been characterized by slow processes, outdated infrastructure, and user experiences that have consistently fallen short of what digital-first workers and retirees expect.
However, a wave of artificial intelligence is set to change one of the most structurally important and technologically stagnant areas of the public sector.
According to Jessica Hurley, Senior Vice President at Majesco, a leading pension administration platform, that change is no longer a prediction. It's already a reality, and over the next five years, she expects an acceleration that will completely rewrite how pension systems operate.
"AI is redefining the operating model for pension systems, from reactive service to proactive success," Hurley says. "We're moving toward platforms that anticipate needs, flag anomalies before they affect payments, and automate decision-making across claims, reconciliation, and service requests."
It's a vision for an industry that's still operating on a foundation of legacy systems that are sometimes older than some of the retirees they serve. But things are looking up.
Maturing machine learning models, cloud-native platforms, and generative AI assistants are beginning to lay the groundwork for one of the deepest transformations in the history of public benefits.
The Next Five Years: From Call Centers to Cognitive Systems
The traditional world of pension administration has meant complexity: complex data models, cumbersome processes for filing claims, and members calling in for help navigating intricate sets of rules that vary dramatically based on career history and plan design.
However, the rise of AI is changing the situation for the better, transforming reactive systems to more predictive ones.
Majesco's SaaS platform, V3locity, already has generative AI woven throughout its enterprise stack. This will become even more prevalent throughout the next five years, where Hurley believes that AI automatically interprets policy details, personalizes responses, and triages requests before they reach a human, will become the norm.
But she emphasizes that the goal isn't automation alone. Rather, it's about allowing pension agencies to provide "intelligence at scale."
"Every interaction should be guided by data-driven insight," she says. "The goal isn't just efficiency—it's smarter systems that adapt continuously to the needs of members and employers."
Where AI Will Have the Biggest Impact
Hurley identifies three areas in which AI is currently realizing a clear efficiency payoff—and in which the trajectory of improvement will become exponential.
1. Member Servicing
The reality is that generative AI copilots and in-platform assistants are capable of generating contextual and persona-based responses in real time. The days of holding on the phone or wading through PDFs are over. Retirees or employees can get real-time, accurate guidance that's tailored to their specific situation and needs.
The outcome: fewer support requests, quicker resolutions, and a drastically more modernized service experience.
2. Claims & Benefit Processing
The impact of AI is even more apparent in high-volume environments.
"Intelligent triage and auto-classification will speed straight-through processing while maintaining full auditability," Hurley says.
What this means is that the process, which previously called for several human handoffs to process a claim, now allows the claim to go from filing to approval within minutes, not days or weeks.
3. Operational Intelligence
This is the level that agencies tend to overlook: AI's ability to look for patterns inside operations.
With predictive analytics, problems users experience, training needs, and process bottlenecks are uncovered even before they have a negative impact on service quality. This builds what Hurley refers to as a "continuous improvement loop" because "every interaction contributes to making the system smarter."
Inside the AI-Powered Pension Platform
Unlike many government technology suppliers who are still in the pilot phase for AI, Majesco has already deployed machine learning capabilities.
Among them:
- AI-powered support assistants that operate as real-time guides within the platform.
- Seamless Operations Copilot that handles routine administrative duties in the background.
- Predictive Insights that analyze user behavior and feedback.
All these technologies are working towards reducing resolution times, allowing agencies to quickly adopt new features, and transforming operational data into intelligence.
Hurley finds these applications to be merely initial forays into what will amount to a much bigger change for AI.
Once these 'back-office' tasks in administration are augmented, then these institutions will be able to move from executing tasks to strategic planning and personalizing member outcomes.
Can AI and Privacy Coexist?
The most sensitive data in the public sector is pension data. This includes names, employment history, Social Security numbers, health information, and lifetime financial benefits.
Any AI system for this sector has to meet very stringent conditions pertaining to privacy, oversight, or auditability.
According to Hurley, innovation and security are complementary processes. This means that organizations don't need to choose between being innovative and being secure.
"Every GenAI capability in V3locity follows strict governance—data anonymization, bias detection, human-in-the-loop oversight, and full auditability," she says.
In addition, she considers the application of AI to be increasing security measures rather than reducing them.
Majesco relies on AI-driven anomaly detection and adaptive authentication to monitor risk posture in real time. This ensures that threats can be identified and addressed sooner than ever before under traditional security models.
In a world where attacks against government agencies continue to increase at an unprecedented rate, the future focus on proactive defense could well be where AI's greatest strength lies.
The Legacy Problem: AI Needs Modern Plumbing
In the pension industry, the biggest hurdle in adopting AI often doesn't lie in the technology but in the infrastructure that supports it.
"Legacy systems often lack clean data models, modern APIs, and the elasticity required for real-time learning," Hurley says.
This is exactly what's making cloud-native platforms so important to modernization. These platforms make it possible to add an AI layer to processes in a non-disruptive manner, without having to overhaul systems.
In Majesco's case, V3locity removes data's dependency on inefficient workflows, thus allowing phased adoption with ROI at every step.
A 2035 Preview: Retirement, Reimagined
A decade from now, what exactly does Hurley have in mind? She foresees something far removed from today's pension experience.
"Retirees will interact through secure, conversational assistants that understand their intent, provide personalized guidance, and proactively notify them about actions before issues arise," she says.
The actual work behind the curtains will be accomplished by AI, which will process 90% of all routine administration tasks. Humans, meanwhile, will focus on empathy, oversight, and complex judgment calls.
This will result in faster service, fewer mistakes, and a more human-centric experience, all thanks to technology that disappears into the background.
"It's a world where technology doesn't replace human connection," Hurley emphasizes. "It enhances it."
For an industry characterized by complexity and where the systems are decades old, the AI revolution is no longer in the distant future.
It's already happening and could be the most significant change in the pension industry in half a century.
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